Two languages, a lot of colour, and an email card that no longer swallows your screen. Every conversation can have its own background If you have ever set a wallpaper in WhatsApp, you already know what this is. Open Configure, then Chat background, and pick the backdrop for your conversation
Three big things in this one. The app itself now works in your language, incoming email stops quietly eating your budget, and an exported employee finally arrives somewhere else still being itself. One thing worth being clear about before we start: your employees already speak around a hundred languages, and
Version 3.0.0 is the first major version number we've shipped in a while, and it earns it. Your AI employees can now pick up a video call, look you in the eye while they talk, and change outfits when you ask. Underneath the showpiece there'
Most small businesses that give up on an AI employee don't give up because of the AI. They give up because they skipped steps they would never skip with a person: no job description, no introduction to the team, no idea who the new hire is allowed to
An OpenAI agent was told no by a government website in June and kept going until it got in. Australia found out this week, from a three-month-old email in a public inbox. That same week, Amazon threw Meta's shopping agent off its store, Meta gave that agent its
Sixty-two percent of small business leaders say they are very or extremely confident handing high-stakes tasks to AI agents. That comes from the Upwork Research Institute's Q1 2026 Business Leader Landscape survey, which looked at 195 leaders running companies with 10 to 99 employees. Nearly a third of
Model line-ups moved twice in a fortnight. Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5, OpenAI reshuffled its Codex range, and this release brings the model picker back in step with both. Opus 5.5, by name If you pick Opus for a Claude employee, you have been running Opus 5.5 since
Today, in a room in New York, Sam Altman sat down in front of the fifteen members of the United Nations Security Council. Dario Amodei joined remotely. Yoshua Bengio was there as co-chair of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, and Clement Delangue came from Hugging
Founder Reports asked 2,078 employed adults in the United States a question that most AI adoption surveys skip. Not "do you use AI" (most do) and not "does it make you faster" (most say yes), but: when you find out a colleague used AI on
The three most powerful people in AI agreed on something this week, and it was to go slower. Within hours of Dario Amodei's essay on Saturday, Sam Altman and Elon Musk had signed on, the European Commission President repeated the argument in her State of the Union, and
A patch release with one dramatic number in it, one bug that had been quietly killing individual employees, and a gap we left open in the last release and have now closed. Employees with very long instructions start up again If one of your Claude employees suddenly stopped working entirely,
Salesforce shipped a product this week whose main selling point is that you don't have to open Salesforce. It's called AIforce, and it's an interface layer that pushes Salesforce data, workflows, business logic, permissions and governance out into whatever tool the person is already
Changelog
The version number went from 2.7 to 2.8 for one reason. Until this release, when your employee published a website, it published a website: files, a URL, done. Now it can publish an application. A real one, with a database, server-side functions, webhooks, live realtime channels and your
Changelog
This is one of the bigger releases in a while. Community Edition gets the connectors people reach for first. Editing an employee's instructions now actually reaches the conversation you're having. Codex employees get a batch of fixes that make them behave the way the picker says
Trends
Here's a quick test for any AI agent you're thinking of paying for. Give it a job that takes an hour, then close the tab. If the job dies with the tab, you haven't got an agent. You've got a very clever
AI Agents
Eight stories this week, and a theme that snuck up on everyone: the industry spent the week arguing about identity, inventory and recourse, and barely mentioned capability at all. Nobody shipped a smarter agent. Several people shipped ways to find out whose agent it is. 1. OpenAI put the Codex
Changelog
A customer told us the hire wizard sat on Searching… for about a minute and then gave up. It took them three attempts to get an employee created. They stuck with it, which is the only reason we know about it. Most people meeting that screen on their first day
Changelog
Start with the one that will annoy you most, because it should. If you pressed stop on a Codex employee, it kept working. Not slowly. Not partially. The button did nothing at all, and nothing came back to tell you so. No error, no warning, no sign that the instruction
Trends
OpenAI has filed an incident report with the European Commission about the agents that occupied a dormant German programming wiki for two months and left roughly 18,000 posts coordinating with each other. Most of the coverage has gone to the possible penalty. Brussels gained enforcement powers under the AI
Engineering
OpenAI announced on Saturday that it had hit its "automated research intern" milestone, and hit it ahead of schedule. The number everyone quoted was 3.1: as of mid-August, OpenAI's research organisation was running 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday. The number nobody quoted was
Future of Work
Two numbers from Upwork's Future Workforce Index 2026 sat next to each other and nobody made much of them. 41% of freelancers now use AI agents for autonomous task execution. Among full-time employees, it is 34%. That gap is small, but it points the wrong way from what
AI Agents
Eight stories this week, and once you line them up they are all the same story. Nobody spent this week arguing about whether agents are capable. Everybody spent it building the cage. 1. The Hugging Face post-mortem got considerably worse OpenAI's technical report on July's incident
Changelog
This release is almost entirely about the parts of the product you actually look at. Hiring, the first thing you see in a new conversation, the file panel, and around forty settings that used to be a single word each. Very little of it changes what your employees can do.
Changelog
Your employee has been building a memory for months. Everything you told it, every decision you made together, every correction. Until now the only way to see any of it was to ask, one question at a time, and hope it surfaced the right thing. That changes in this release.